Epiphany 4 A - January 29, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

Epiphany 4 A - Sunday, January 29, 2023

Micah 6:1-8

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Matthew 5:1-12

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

 

Lord Jesus Christ, through the gift of your Spirit and sacraments, grant us pure hearts and enlightened minds, that we may see God and be transfigured at the sight and help transfigure the world. Amen.

Simone de Beauvoir once said, “It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.” And Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.” 

If you took Metro-North down into the city and were to stand on any busy street corner and ask passersby, “what is your idea of a blessed life,” you would probably hear something like… “a blessed life means having more than enough;” or “being able to vacation at your place of choice…whenever you want.” Perhaps you might hear, “a blessed life is freedom from sickness and disease and from war and oppression.” What you probably wouldn’t hear would be… “a blessed life is to be poor, to suffer, or to have a loved one pass away.” Neither would you likely hear… “a blessed life is to be persecuted and shamed for being who you are and doing the right thing.” Yet, this, shockingly, is precisely what Jesus is inferring here in the Beatitudes. How are we to make sense of this?

For St. Matthew, Jesus is a new and fully realized Moses…a prophet who makes known the Word of God. Like Moses, Jesus ascends a mountain and speaks forth divine revelation and makes the heart of God known. Like all of Israel’s prophets from Moses through John the Baptist, Jesus’ message is one which seeks to reunite God’s people back to God in a bond of covenant fidelity. Throughout the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Prophets, the heart of God is wrenched because of Israel’s infidelity and propensity to seek refuge in other gods.

Yet, Yahweh never gives up on the ones he has chosen to be his own and relentlessly pursues them. Micah writes of a divine judicial case where Yahweh’s “controversy” with Israel is stirred, where Yahweh “contends” with his chosen for her lack of fidelity even after having experienced his saving power time and time again. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” There is only one hope for restoration, as far as Micah is concerned…not the offering of sacrifices but only the offering of one’s total life in doing justice, in loving kindness, and in walking humbly with God. Micah, like all of the prophets, is highly sensitized to the many ways in which Israel evaded her call to covenant fidelity. Hiding behind acts of worship had become one of the most egregious of all evasions. Hiding behind the law would become another. 

But what Jesus, the prophet of the new covenant, and Paul, the great explicator of the new covenant after him, would both proclaim with unmistakable clarity and force was that neither sacrifice nor obedience to the law, nor anything else for that matter, is really the object of God’s desire…only the human heart and the totality of one’s life. But if there is one thing that humankind has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is that we, as a human family, are utterly incapable of remaining faithful to God and persist in our evasions. A question, then, hangs over every page of the Hebrew Scriptures…where is the ability to be true to God without evasion or compromise to come if it is not in ourselves? The answer was given emphatically…not by any human being but by God…and not in a text but in a living, breathing person…Jesus the Christ!…who showed us that doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God was, in fact, possible…which brings us back to the Beatitudes.

The new law that Jesus preaches up on the mountaintop is, you can say, a honing in of the commandments of God previously given by Moses that would effectively eliminate all human efforts at evasion once and for all. With this law, there is no place to hide, to justify oneself, or to don a mask. Neither is there any room for complacency or compromise. It is a call to a way of life free from the deceits of the ego and the ambitions of the false self. It is, finally, a way to live fully alive in the presence of God’s fiery love—far distant from the deadening effects of the wisdom of the world.

This wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God, keeps us supple and ready, eager to give, fervent to love. Yet, it comes only at a great cost—the stripping away of our selfish wills and the humbling of our false selves…and hence why we expend every effort at evasion and devise every method conceivable at its maintenance. Yet, God’s “controversy” is stirred, and God “contends” with us and wrestles us to the ground…and thank God for this contending! That our God cares enough to demand everything of us and sometimes makes us miserable until we finally surrender! 

As I see it, the Beatitudes, and the whole Sermon on the Mount which follows…this call to be perfect just as God is perfect…is utterly impossible. The power to soar to these heights is not within us and the expectations and demands of the kingdom is a burden too heavy to bear. But this is precisely the gift of God’s demand. It is what helps us cut through the illusions of our self-sufficiency and helps us embrace our own indigence and poverty. And this alone is the place of truth and liberation. The comfort that leads to complacency is one of the greatest traps that the enemy uses to deprive us of God’s abundant life. And there are really only two ways out of the spiritual malaise which all too soon has us all walking around like soulless zombies. 

One is the moment of crisis which rattles us from our spiritual slumber, and the other is the voluntary submission of our will based on the conviction that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” Whether one or the other, both have the ability to shatter the illusions we gradually begin to believe about ourselves and our lives in this world and enlarge the heart. They awaken us to the fact that our good is never good enough and that our vocation is not to being content but to being ecstatically alive. This is precisely what the original founders of the monastic movement were convinced of…complacency leads to spiritual death, voluntary death to self leads to fullness of life. And so off to the desert they went.

We here too follow their lead and their wisdom. It is a wisdom in stark opposition to the best the world has to offer and a sure path to a truly blessed life… a life of beatitude. Particularly here in the Order of the Holy Cross…we who are consecrated to the foolishness of the cross and a crucified Messiah…we, here, are called to be a prophetic witness of life alive from the dead where the complacent state of mind is shattered to pieces and where the illusions of the good give way to the reality of the sublime.

Blessed are the voluntary poor, the meek, the just, the merciful, and those who freely choose lives of purity and peace in service to one another and to all who seek refuge in the shelter of this tent, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.

Amen.

Epiphany 3 A - January 22, 2023

St Mary the Virgin, New York, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Epiphany 3 A - Sunday, January 22, 2023

Isaiah 9:1-4

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Matthew 4:12-23

For some years now I have served on the Commission on Ministry of the Diocese of New York. I've also, throughout my 36 years as a member of the Order of the Holy Cross, worked with hundreds of people as vocations director or spiritual director. We get used to hearing about calls: calls to ordained ministry, calls to monastic or religious life, calls to a certain career path or to one or another personal or family relationship. And all of this is usually framed with questions: Is this what God is calling me to do or be, and how do I know? Will this make me happy or fulfilled? Will this bring my life meaning? Am I equipped to do this? And the bonus question: is this what I truly desire?

Most people, especially when considering a professional religious vocation, if you will, develop a ‘call narrative,’ a kind of two-minute elevator speech where they sum up what has happened to them in their life that has led them to this point of considering such a life choice.

While this is a helpful tool in the process of discernment, the process of figuring out where to go in our lives no matter where we are in the life cycle, I've grown a bit suspicious about call narratives. They generally leave out as much, or more, than they express. Yes, there is often a catalyzing experience that we can point to, often in retrospect, which seems to capture a powerful moment or experience in

our life, and which shapes our sense of being chosen for or directed to one way or another path. And sometimes that catalyzing experience is quite dramatic and transformative, so much so that we can date it to an exact place and time. I believe we've all had such experiences to a greater or lesser extent. But for most of us, most of the time, the experience of call and of our response to a call is slow and

complex and uncertain… which is to say risky. And this applies both to calls in the narrow sense, such as that to ordained ministry or the religious life, as well as in the broader sense of life choices in general, all those decisions and options we face about careers, commitments, where we live, how we spend our time and energy and resources, how we engage with our own selves and with others and our

community and indeed with the world. Each of these kinds of choices—which are regular elements in all lives—have an element of a call in them: we are asked to respond to an invitation to a new and to what we hope is a larger life.

Some calls may prove to be temporary, whether we know it or not at the time. Other calls are lifelong. And there are always calls within calls as we grow and mature and commit and recommit to our vocational choices. We often say in the monastery: “The reason I came and the reason I stay are not the same,” though I do hope they are related. The same is true at many levels.

It's impossible to capture this complex process in a two-minute call story, though we often try. Guests frequently ask me about why I entered the monastery, so over the years I've developed my own little call narrative which usually begins with me at about age eleven seeing the Sound of Music and hearing those nuns chanting what I now know to be tone two ending one and sensing at some deep place in my heart that I want to do that, that I almost had to, that I was destined to. Of course so much more was going on than I knew at the time and that I still don’t know even now sixty years later.

Today's gospel passage, the story of the call Peter and Andrew and James and John is perhaps the archetypal Christian call story. But it offers us just the barest outline of what must have been an amazingly nuanced and multilayered event. Jesus is the actor here. The disciples say nothing. Jesus calls them to follow him, and they respond by leaving their nets, leaving their families and livelihoods. But to go where? Nothing is said about the context. What do these fishermen know about this man? Have they heard talk, rumors, gossip about Jesus? Do they even recognize that this is Jesus? What does he want of them? Where does he want them to go? For how long? For what purpose? They don't know. 

And truthfully, most of the time, neither do we when we're confronted by a decision, a choice, an invitation, a call. We can of course weigh all the evidence. We can evaluate skills and interests and compare possible gains against uncertain losses. We might consider our social and educational backgrounds, our needs, and preferences and commitments. We might explore the Myers-Briggs inventory or the Enneagram and take the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory). All of these may be helpful and sometimes even required. But like the disciples in today's gospel, we never know fully. We never have all the information. And the future will always remain, to some degree, uncertain. There is always, always a risk, a stepping out in faith in any real response.

Over the years I have met people who have labored under a theology of call or of vocation which went something like this: from eternity God has ordained a certain path for me, and my job is to figure out what that path is and then to follow it. Further, all my happiness, all my holiness depends on my finding that path, that unique way, that vocational choice without which my soul’s welfare is imperiled and my salvation is jeopardized. This is a very hard and a very dangerous theology, but not an altogether uncommon one. It offers a vision of God which is, to say the least, harsh and perhaps even cruel. Yes, vocational discernment and life choices can be difficult, even agonizing. But there are ways forward, including theological ones.

When I was first working with inquirers considering monastic life, I came across a book by Trappist monk Basil Pennington titled simply “Called.” In it, Pennington stresses the bounty and generosity of God in vocational discernment as well as in much other choosing. He counsels that instead of thinking of vocation as some kind of divine mystery that needs to be cracked, it is more helpful to think of God as inviting us, say, to a smorgasbord. God leads us to the table of our life and says something like: “I know you pretty well. I think you'll like that chopped liver.” If you're smart, if you're wise, you'll try the chopped liver. But it's also OK to say, “Thank you. I think I'll skip the liver, but those deviled eggs look really good. I'll try those.” And God will rejoice. God will work with you in the choice you have made to lead to the best possible outcome. The only way we can totally fail or totally reject God's call, and by extension our vocation, is to refuse to eat at the table at all, to say in one way or another: “I don't like your smorgasbord. I’m out of here.” Beyond that, though, there is a wide freedom and generosity and joy in God's call to us.

Today is Religious Life Sunday. And certainly St. Mary's has had a long history with vowed religious working here alongside you for well over a century. We celebrate that today. Today is also the Sunday within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity when we once again recommit ourselves to work for the full visible unity of Christ’s Church at a time when it seems either less important or less possible than ever, especially as the institutional church seems to fade into relative obscurity. But these two observances are related in some important ways.

Religious life, particularly monastic life, traces its roots to and makes witness to a history that predates the division between Protestant and Catholic, which even predates the split between Eastern and Western Christianity. In fact, monastic life and its practices has been a point of meeting and dialogue not just between Christians but between many other spiritual paths and practices, especially Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi traditions. This gives me hope and helps me to understand the place of our monastic witness as a bridge toward unity and maybe even sanity. Unity at whatever level will happen in God's time to be sure, and it will happen the more faithfully and transparently we each of us lives out our calling, our vocation, our life choices and commitments. Unity, Christian unity and wider unity, will happen in God's time when we embrace the compassionate heart which is at the center of the religious quest. Unity between peoples and races and classes and tribes and nations will happen when we allow our vocation, whatever it may be, with its tough choices and struggles and sorrows and failures along with its joys shine in the world as we share openly the human struggle. It is there that God is to be found, and not elsewhere. And it is there that God’s church serves and celebrates until the Lord takes her home.

Monasteries and religious houses and large urban churches such as St. Mary’s have always been places where the ‘nones’ (that is those who have no formal religious formation or affiliation) and the ‘dones’ (those who have simply had it with institutional religion) and seekers of all stripes can find a resting place, a temporary refuge, and perhaps even an abiding home. That is our vocation. That is our call.

Welcome to the smorgasbord. And don't be afraid to try the chopped liver.

Amen.

Epiphany 3 A - January 22, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Epiphany 3 A - Sunday, January 22, 2023

Isaiah 9:1-4

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Matthew 4:12-23

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

 

In the name of God the Lover, the Beloved and the Love ever flowing. Amen.

At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed "that they all may be one."  (cf. John 17:21)

From January 18 to January 25, Christian churches around the world observe the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. That we all may be One.

The Church Unity Octave, a forerunner of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, was developed by Father Paul Wattson, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, at Graymoor in Garrison, 35 miles South of here on the other side of the river. 

It was first observed at Graymoor, in 1908. It is now observed worldwide.

Today’s epistle is right on point.

*****

In this morning’s passage of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, he enjoins his brothers and sisters in the Jesus movement to unity. Christian unity is important at the local level and at the universal level. But unity is challenged at both levels.

Paul starts at the local level. Which is where our behaviors have the most impact. He warns against cliques and factions. Cliques and factions are contentious self-seeking groups within a larger community. 

In the church at Corinth, Paul is concerned by sub-groups that have formed in identification and allegiance to whomever has baptized them. This seems to be happening regardless of whether those baptizers even know about or approve of those cliques.

And in claiming this allegiance to their respective baptizers, the cliques disagree with and oppose one another. They introduce incoherence and confusion in the larger community. They do not embody love of their neighbor as Jesus asks them to.

As Paul suggests, one may even claim allegiance to Jesus to attempt to justify one’s clique. One can say “I belong to Christ” and be self-seeking and contentious in doing it. That doesn’t cut it with Paul.

Jesus said “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34)

So the alternative to self-seeking, contentious behavior is to love God and neighbor as oneself. It helps to remember that I and the person I may be in contention with are both in God and beloved of God.

*****

This call to unity also serves at the level of the whole Body of Christ, the whole church, the whole world.

A man drew a diagram of the Christian Church in this way: He drew it as a circle with several radii converging on the center which he called “Christ.” On the different radii, he wrote the names of the different denominations of Christians. Underneath he wrote the words, “The nearer to the center, Christ, the nearer to each other.”

*****

What can keep us from a unity centered on Jesus, the Christ?

In Christ, divisions between church bodies, races, backgrounds, educational levels, incomes, political affiliation, break down. We should help, not hinder, that breakdown.

In Christ there is no north or south, no east or west. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. We are all one as we are one in the Lord. So let us act “as if” until we really believe it.

*****

One of the root problems of our culture today is that we have politicized everything. I am right. Therefore you are wrong. And my side needs to win at all costs. And I only listen to the ones who think and talk like me, lest I should walk in your shoes for a couple of miles.

We are called to be one with Christ and with each other. To be closer to the LORD means that we will draw nearer to each other; to draw closer to our fellow believers means that we have come nearer to the LORD.

The unity of God’s people is God-pleasing in itself. Remember how Jesus prayed in John’s Gospel that his followers would be one with each other just as he and the Father were one.

Jesus said “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:21)

*****

Christian unity is for the sake of the whole world. Human unity - including Christianity but going well beyond that to all Creation - is for the sake of the world. 

How we bring about peace, justice and love for all - the Kingdom of God - hinges on our ability to seek common purpose among Christians, but also among all humans.

Jesus helps us with that. We need to keep praying for God’s peace, justice and love to prevail everywhere, not just among Christians. And we need to act in accordance with our prayers.

*****

When Paul talks about having one mind, he is speaking of unity not uniformity. This unity enriches diversity - a real rainbow of peoples, ideas, cultures, goals.

But Jesus-centered unity does not reside in our best thought, our best behavior, or our pedigreed background. Our unity is in Jesus Christ. Do we learn from Him; do we follow Him; do we love Him?

As we accept each other, speak well of each other, interpret the actions of each other in the kindest way, as we love each other, we come closer to Christ. 

As we learn and study and worship and pray together, we come closer to the cross of Christ and to each other. 

*****

Beloved Jesus, the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to us who follow you, it is the power of God. As you were raised up on the cross, you lovingly embraced us all with no exception. Give us to embrace all of your beloved Creation as our Sister, as our Brother, without exceptions.

Amen.

Epiphany 2 A - January 15, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy, OHC

Epiphany 2 A - Sunday, January 15, 2023

Isaiah 49:1-7

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

John 1:29-42

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Today’s gospel gives us the evangelist John’s account of the Baptism of Jesus.  I’ve always thought there is something a bit “off” about it.  The accounts of Jesus’ baptism in the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, are all straightforward narratives of the baptism, differing somewhat in details but each telling what happened from an eyewitness point of view.  But John is different: he gives us a curiously roundabout story, full of indirection.  John the Baptist tells us the story.  But he does not tell us the story of the baptism itself.  Rather, he tells us what he saw: “the Spirit descended from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.”   This is a very economical text, so even more curiously, in this very compact narrative, the Baptist tells us twice - twice! - “I myself did not know him”.  “I myself did not know him”.  A point is being made here, a point about knowing.  He only knows who Jesus is because he saw the Spirit in the form of a dove.

In John’s gospel the action of the baptism isn’t actually told, but is referred to indirectly.  John the Baptist did not know who Jesus was until he, John, saw the dove descending.  And the next time he sees Jesus, it is at a distance, as Jesus is walking by, in an almost cinematic scene, the two great men passing but not actually meeting.

What can we make of all this narrative indirection?  

John’s gospel begins with the famous line, en arche en ho logos, which every seminarian hopes will be on her or his Greek translation exam.  In the beginning was the Word.  So we ponder the Word, the Word which is the light that is coming into the world. The Logos itself absorbs our attention.  But remember what happens when the Word, the light, comes into the world: “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.  He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”  The gospel of John is talking about receiving, about recognizing, about knowing.  The tragedy of the world is in not recognizing, not knowing the One who is its own creator, who is the Word on which its very existential order is based, and so not receiving Him.   

The story of the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan is a real life example of what it means that the world – the world including all the best people in it, even John the Baptist, whom Jesus later calls the greatest of all the prophets – the whole world, including the righteous part of it – is simply not capable of knowing, of recognizing, the Word when it comes.   

With this theme announced, John’s gospel immediately introduces John the Baptist, the herald of the coming One, whose prophetic sign is to be out in the desert, crying out in the wilderness.  Preparing the way for His coming and baptizing God’s people into their new entrance into God’s promised land.  Into a new life, a new beginning.  And, embodying the prologue’s statement about not knowing, not recognizing, John the Baptist himself does not know who the Logos is when he comes.  Twice - twice - the Baptist tells us, “I myself did not know him”.  “I myself did not know him”.  He knows him only because of the sign from heaven, and then they do not even meet.  This telling, far from being straightforward, is a miracle of indirection.  It is a description of the world we live in.  It is a description of our existential reality, our not being capable of knowing, of recognizing, God’s presence among us without God’s intervention.     

John’s account of the baptism of Jesus could be an illustration of the gospel’s insight into how the Logos enters into our world: How indirect it can be, how it is not immediately apparent even to those of us who are eagerly waiting for its appearing among us. 

What can we make of this?  Is it simply a narrative for us to puzzle over?  Is it John the evangelist’s way of dealing with John the Baptist, famous in his own time when Jesus was hardly known?  It is those, clearly.  But there is something else here as well.

One of the things seriously observant religious people, and I hope that we here this morning  qualify in this, do is to read and meditate on scripture.   One form of that, of course, is lectio divina.  We read the text as it is, try to understand it in its own context, and then let the text move us in meditation, contemplation and prayer.  It is astonishing how often even passages that seem the least promising end up opening us to new light, new life, new beginnings, new entrances into God’s promised land for us.

What draws people to faith?  I would venture that while people are searching for community, while they desire the simultaneously rational and emotional and ecstatic satisfactions of beauty, while they hope to build peace and justice, the primary thing they yearn for is assurance of God’s existence, assurance that the world we live in is God’s world, that our lives matter in an ultimate sense, that God is real and present to us.  Please forgive me, in this I am speaking of my own experience and generalizing it to all of us, but when we find God in our own lives, that finding is usually far from a straightforward story.  It is usually by indirection: the unexpected, or perhaps entirely ordinary, appearance of things in our lives that brings God’s presence to us.  Jesus was apparently one of the undifferentiated crowd of people come out to the Jordan to be baptized.  John the Baptist he did not know him - until the Spirit revealed Jesus to him.  

I suspect there is a strategy in telling this story to us the way John’s gospel does.  The Baptist and his disciples are standing in for all the people of God, all who are waiting for the Word, waiting for the light, to come among us.  We are like John the Baptist.  We want some sure sign that God is coming into the world.  We hope and we pray for God’s coming, and for the fruit of God’s presence among us in a renewed community, in beauty, order, peace, justice, and in our ecstatic union with the divine.  But it does not come on our schedule.  It does not come in our expected categories.  We don’t actually know what or who it will be, what form our encounter may take.   Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we may already be traveling with the Lord and do not know it until we invite him into our actual lives to share a simple meal.  He may come to us as a thief in the night, completely unexpected.  As in the parables, Jesus tells us that we will find God present in the ordinary.  We need to open our eyes to see and our ears to hear what the Spirit is filling and transfiguring right here and right now.  While we, like John the Baptist, may be ready, even eager, for the inbreaking of the Word, we have no idea what it will look like or how it may happen, or who may embody it.  

So what to do?  Well, as this story John tells suggests, there is a way.  

Get ready.  Go out into our own wilderness.  Realize who we are: God’s people.  Focus on God’s promise.  Be honest about who we have become and heed the cry to change.  Get down into the river.  Wade in the water.  Let it roll over us.  Watch for the sign of God’s presence.  We don’t know yet exactly how but we need to be ready, to be open to the unexpected.  The Word will come.  The light will shine in the darkness.  And then, when we are called, follow. 

Feast of the Holy Name - January 1, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus - Sunday, January 1, 2023

Numbers 6:22-27

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:15-21

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Name. It is the celebration of the great mystery of that which is beyond naming taking a name for our sake.  

In the reading from the Book of Numbers we heard this morning, which is one of the most beautiful passages in all of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Holy Name of God is placed on the people as a priestly blessing. “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD’S face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up the divine countenance upon you, and give you peace. So they shall put my Name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” And since, as Saint Paul writes to the Galatians, we are heirs, the face of God is meant to shine upon us. Ponder for a moment the enormity and the beauty of that! The Holy Name of God is placed upon us too. It is an event of immense love and intimacy to which we can most appropriately respond to with silent awe and gratitude.

The word translated in the passage as “LORD” is the unspeakable Hebrew Name of God, the Tetragrammaton, or the letters (YHVH) pronounced by Christians as Yahweh, but never uttered by Jews. When the Name had to be spoken, it was replaced with “Elohim” (the strong God), or “Adonai” (the Lord) or “Hashem” (the Name). In the Bible we see it most often referred to as LORD in capitalized form where the tetragrammaton would have appeared. LORD, in this sense, is a way of pointing to what is beyond words and cannot be named.  

Many mystics believe that we carry the name of God on every breath. That is why it cannot be spoken, because it is the sound of breath. The spirit of God is within us and around us. Every time we take a breath during our chanting of prayers in this church we are breathing in the spirit of God and that same spirit comes out manifested in song, in beauty. So today’s feast presents one of the many paradoxes of the Christian faith- the tension between what can and cannot be named, between saying and unsaying. This is directly connected to the circle of contemplation and action. Contemplation leads to action and action leads back to contemplation, and so forth. 

The name Jesus is a translation of the Greek Iesous, which is itself a transliteration of the Aramaic Yeshua, a shortened version of the Hebrew Yehoshua or, in English, Joshua. The most common etymological meaning of Yehoshua is “Yahweh saves.” Upon doing a little digging, however, I was fascinated to find out that other meanings rendered have been “Yaweh is a saving-cry” or Yaweh is a cry for saving.” Cry in this sense means shout. So we could say that one of the meanings of the Holy Name of our Lord Jesus the Christ is “Yahweh shouts salvation.”  The reason why I find these meanings so significant is because they seem to describe more clearly the paradoxical tension of the Holy Name.  

The Unspeakable becomes a cry for saving. The saving shout points to the unspeakable. The Silence that is beyond comprehension becomes the Word made flesh. The Word made flesh points to the Silence. The reality that is beyond naming and is present in our very breath becomes a name and, as today’s collect states, “the sign of our salvation.”  

In first-century Aramaic there was no word for “salvation.” Salvation was understood as being made alive. It concerned the whole person. To  become whole was to be transformed from within into our true identity, our deepest freedom that only comes from God’s infinite love for us. This LOVE is always present, always meets us where we are, at our point of need, whatever it may be. LOVE works with what is. There can be no obstacle to our union with this LOVE except our own resistance expressed in our lack of faith. Jesus clearly expressed this when time and again he said to those he had healed: “Your faith has saved you,” or “your faith has made you well.” And by faith, I don’t mean intellectual agreement, but the commitment to stay the course, to live with the questions and the unknown. Lasting faith requires a great deal of humility and willingness to admit and accept our vulnerability.  

This vulnerability is modeled for us by the LOVE who would choose to be incarnate in the form of a defenseless baby born to a humble refugee family in an occupied land. There, in a feeding trough, the Reign of this LOVE that is beyond all words breaks into human history and is present to ALL. And ALL means ALL! But when we choose self-preservation, experiencing this life-giving LOVE becomes very difficult. The more we let go of our need to certainty and security, the more we can experience this life-giving LOVE. Saving our life we will lose it. It is only by losing our life for the sake of this LOVE that we will find it. And for that, we need each other. We come from LOVE, and we are made to love one another as the LOVE that is beyond all that is loves us.  

During the Christmas season we commemorate and celebrate the paradox of the Incarnation- the Unspeakable is spoken. Today, the Unnameable takes on a name and cries salvation. So, I invite you to return to your breath. Breathe prayerfully, in silent awe and humble gratitude because the Nameless and the Named are One within us and around us in immense love and intimacy. May we all be filled with joy and hope this year, and most importantly, may our whole being be present to the LOVE that surpasses all understanding. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! 

Amen+